The Godfather goes green

Ignore business fundamentals and remove the give and take of real markets and this is what you get — piles of taxpayer money going to “businesses” that are simply shell games. It was only a matter of time before the mafia figured out this was the easiest money ever.

In Italy, almost $2 billion was funneled to phony “green” front companies.

This is the inevitable result when one removes risk and an earned reward, profit, as subjected to the intense pressures and competition of the free market system.

Public-private partnerships are the easiest ways to get private fingers into the public purse.

A true supply and demand marketplace — tempered by the rule of law and an army of attorneys seeking lawsuits — acts as a battering ram to keep businesses on the straight and narrow.

“…$8.7 billion set aside for clean energy projects by the EU until 2013 has attracted the Mafia and other organised crime syndicates, especially in Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2007, however, the sheer scale of the scams has escalated with developments of wind farms in southern Italy – one of Europe’s least windy countries – causing most concern. Many turbines have stood idle while, Kroll maintains, some were never built at all. Sicily alone has seen an explosion of wind projects, with more than 30 wind farms now dotting its western hills – especially in the Mafia heartland of Corleone, made famous by the Godfather films.”

As the line from The Godfather goes, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” It’s obvious that, if you throw in a few Ph.D.s and a treaty or two, it’s possible to raid the treasuries of the developed world without ever firing a shot.

It is relatively easy to sue a business when it steals your money. But it is impossible to sue government over bad policy that simply hands hard-earned taxpayer dollars to any “green” scheme out there. In Europe, taxpayers are learning this the hard way.

I can only say one good thing about all of this: at least the Mafiose will spend their ill-gotten gains on goods and services, recycling all those dollars (taxed from business earnings by big government) right back into — you guessed it — the real free-market economy!

Call it a “green” stimulus plan, Godfather style!